⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

❤️‍🩹 What To Say To A Child Who Has Lost A Pet: Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh offers some comforting words. Watch here.

🧐 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice: Kevin Kelly offers a collection of 99 life lessons, covering areas like creativity, relationships, and personal growth, encouraging readers to embrace continuous improvement, generosity, and the pursuit of meaningful experiences. Read it here.

⛽️ What You Use To Fuel Transformation Matters: If you hate yourself into change you’re mind will become a breeding ground for bitterness. Watch here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Street artist Ememem fills in cracks in the pavement with these beautiful patterns. I love this because it feels like a wink of the extraordinary hiding in the ordinary, almost alluding to an unseen world of wonders shining through the cracks of the mundane. More plainly, it turns something unsightly into a beautiful art piece. Check his Instagram page for more examples.

👁️ The Child’s Mind

As we age, we become more stiff and rigid. Not just physically.

Our minds calcify. Our spirit hardens.

We become jaded characters living in a world stripped of magic.

This is not how it has to be. It is not how it always was.

A child new to the world gasps in wonder as they encounter the most mundane things.

For them, the common has not yet become ordinary.

They are still living in a kaleidoscope of extraordinary discoveries.

And as we learn skills to become effective in the adult world, it's easy to leave this shimmering existence behind.

You have to be practical, after all.

But that doesn't make this world of wonders disappear. Many of us have just chosen to shut the door.

And I'm here to tell you to open it.

Charles Baudelaire said, "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."

If you can remember when you lived in a world before you knew what everything was...

You might realize that just because you have a name for something doesn't mean you know something.

All of our labels have their limits.

There is more to be seen than we currently see.

That is always true.

Reunite with your child mind in your grown body.

Now your discoveries aren't constrained to riding your bike around the block.

You can venture into the distance, past where the rainbow hides the pot of gold.

Where the ant parade marching through the grass extends into infinity.

Where the dragon-shaped clouds swallow up the sun before the rhythmic raindrops of a cooling summer storm drum to the beat of your imagination.

Play tag with mystery and adventure.

If magic isn't real, then perhaps for too long you've been reading dictionaries written by people who've lost their sense for it.

What if, like when you were a child, it's everywhere and it's obvious.

You just need the eyes to see.

Tag.

You're it.

🎶 The World Is A Song

Tune into this sentiment from author David Byrne:

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Mokita: The truth we all know but agree not to talk about.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Happiness Comes from Giving and Helping, Not Buying and Having

By Steve Taylor

So many of us strive so hard for material success that you might think there was a clear relationship between wealth and happiness. The media and our governments encourage us to believe this since they need us to keep earning and spending to boost economic growth. From school onwards, we’re taught that long-term well-being stems from achievement and economic prosperity—from ‘getting on’ or ‘making it’, accumulating more and more wealth, achievement, and success.

Consequently, it comes as a shock for many people to learn that there is no straightforward relationship between wealth and well-being. Once our basic material needs are satisfied (i.e. once we’re assured of regular food, adequate shelter, and a basic degree of financial security), wealth only has a negligible effect on well-being. For example, studies have shown that, in general, lottery winners do not become significantly happier than they were before, and that even extremely rich people—such as billionaires—are not significantly happier than people with regular salaries. Studies have shown that American and British people are less contented now than they were fifty years ago, although their material wealth is much higher. On an international level, there does appear to be some correlation between wealth and well-being, partly because there are many countries in the world where people’s basic material needs are not satisfied. But this correlation is not straightforward since wealthier countries tend to be more politically stable, more peaceful and democratic, with less oppression and more freedom—all of which are themselves important factors in well-being.

So why do put so much effort into acquiring wealth and material goods? You could compare it to a man who keeps knocking at a door, even though he’s been told that the person he’s looking for isn’t home. “But he must be in there!” he shouts and barges in to explore the house. He storms out again but returns to the house a couple of minutes later to knock again. Seeking well-being through material success is just as irrational.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin